5 skills you should highlight on your resume

74% of Indian CEOs believe finding a creative and innovative workforce is a challenge. As the number of candidates, per job post, rises, it’s important to make your resume effective and eye-candy. Instead of making a quality-rich resume that highlights your accomplishments, make a content-rich resume that focuses on your responsibilities. A resume is supposed to be a document that is unique to you.

Different people have different personalities and skills. In the same way, different profiles require a resume with different skill-set. However, there are five skills you should highlight on your resume regardless of your industry. Always highlight what you’ve achieved professionally instead of simply stating that you possess a certain skill. For example, don’t say that you’ve ‘’problem-solving skills’’. Instead, state the problem and show your results. Remember, actions speak louder than words.

Adaptability: Adaptability in the workplace is considered more important than traditional skills such as decision making and risk management. With the growing number of startups and small businesses in India, recruiters are looking for candidates who don’t restrict their boundaries. Employees are expected to play multiple roles, people who can work with cross-functional teams, and adapt to different situations. As a jobseeker, adaptable is the key skill that you should highlight in your resume. But remember, just writing adaptable will not make your resume impactful, you need to show your adaptability qualities.

For example, you could say something along the lines of;

“Hired as a Marketing Executive, and served as content curator while creating content for ios and android apps”

This not only shows your adaptability skills but also proves it.

Leadership: Every business, small or large looks for leadership skills in their prospective employees. Every company expects employees to act as a good leader in the time of need and otherwise. A good leader motivates a team and helps achieve goals, while a bad leader breaks the team spirit and leave a negative impact on a team. Recruiters look for candidates with great leadership skills because these kinds of hiring will further help in retaining other employees.

Just writing “Have great leadership skills” will not make any impact on your future employer. They want to see the outcome of your leadership. Mentioning any project or task which you headed is a great idea to showcase your leadership skills.

Collaboration: Do you know “97% of employees and executives believe lack of alignment within a team impacts the outcome of a task or project”. This is the only reason companies are marking candidates on collaboration skills as well. To boost teamwork, companies conduct regular activities and reward teams for their collaboration skills.

A great way to highlight collaboration in your resume is to talk about group activities and group projects you worked on. You may highlight projects you worked on with other departments.

Problem-Solving: No, doubt, traditional problem-solving skills remain a focus for recruiters. Every new vacancy arises with new problems, like; suddenly a great worker left the organization or company has launched a new vertical which needs immediate attention. To solve these problems, companies hire a skillful person with a problem-solving mindset.

To highlight your problem-solving skills, you need to mention SOAR- Situation, Obstacle, Action, and Outcome.

Tech Savvy: Technological advancement is increasing year by year. Internet penetration will increase by 829 million Indians by 2021 as per the CISCO report. With the constant rise in internet users and consumers, social media has become more important than ever in business. If you have technical skills to run, analyze or improve social media reach, highlight it on your resume.

It’s important to highlight software knowledge if you have any. Make sure you mention all the software in your resume, from basic to complex. Recruiters or hiring managers often do a keyword search to check a candidate’s software or application knowledge.

Companies always look for newness and uniqueness in candidates. Your resume is like your advertisement copy which articulates your accomplishments and qualities. Make sure to make a good one. However, there are five skills you should highlight on your resume regardless of your industry: Adaptability, collaboration, leadership, problem-solving, and tech-savvy.